Through the first four hundred years after the publication of Utopia, the writers who dared look into the future followed, more or less, in Sir Thomas More’s footsteps. Anti-utopia as a literary genre belongs to the twentieth century. This is not necessarily a cause for jeremiads, invocations of the names of Stalin or Hitler, or other forms of hand-wringing. Just as to some people a pessimist is an informed optimist, anti-utopia may be construed as as an informed Utopia. Philosophically, both genres are traceable to Plato’s Republic. Whether that work should be labeled a Utopia or anti-utopia depends on your taste for benevolent rulers; and what ruler has ever declared himself malevolent?

Ask a more or less educated person about anti-utopia, and three names pop up almost automatically: Orwell, Huxley, and Zamyatin. Of the three, Orwell, with 1984, is undoubtedly the most popular, and for good reason: his writing is brilliantly simple, his ideas are easy to digest, and, in our politicized age, his frame of reference is first and foremost political. Huxley’s Brave New World, by contrast, is the outcry of an alarmed aesthete against mass culture, and, though interesting in its way (many of his “dire” predictions turned out to be so timid as to come true), not nearly so powerful or enduring as Orwell’s book.

It fell to Zamyatin to straddle politics and culture.

It fell to Zamyatin to straddle politics and culture. Despite having preceded the other two writers and having directly influenced Orwell (who acknowledges the debt in his article “Freedom and Happiness”), he is the least known of the three. The reasons for his obscurity roughly mirror the ones for Orwell’s popularity: his writing is highly imaginative and hard to translate, his ideas are complex, and he is more an artist than a political writer. The emotional tenor of the two writers also lends itself to popularity in different degrees: the totalitarianism in Orwell’s time is more advanced than in Zamyatin’s, and, understandably, Orwell treats it with fear and loathing—emotions far more accessible than the ironic contempt to be found in Zamyatin’s anti-utopian masterpiece, We.

But, just as there is more to Orwell than 1984, there is more to Zamyatin than We, and some—not all—of it deserves to be known better. Ardis Publishers, a house that specializes in Russian literature, has recently helped to fill this gap by bringing out an early novel of Zamyatin’s in its first English-language edition. At the same time, Ardis has published a collection of scholarly essays on Zamyatin’s We. Both books, each in its own way, give us a better understanding of this talented and complex writer, whose political ideas and modernist aesthetics are as vital today as they were sixty years ago.

Evgeny Zamyatin was born in 1884 (a cabalistically inclined reader is welcome to add a hundred years), in the small town of Lebedyan—the Peoria of Russia, located about two hundred miles south of Moscow. Yet he did not bemoan the provinciality of his hometown. To him, as he put it in an autobiographical sketch that was published in 1929, Lebedyan was “famous for its card sharks, gypsies, horse fairs, and the strongest Russian language—[his was] the Lebedyan described by Tolstoy and Turgenev.”

What he loathed was the institutional boredom of his school years, where the only splash of color in the grayness of daily routine was the red flag on the fire station’s tower. The flag was devoid of political meaning; it just signaled that the temperature had slipped below minus twenty Celsius. “A one-day revolution,” he notes wryly in his sketch.

Upon graduation from secondary school, Zamyatin enrolled at the Polytechnic Institute in St. Petersburg. The year being 1902, how could he stay out of politics? “In those years,” he wrote, “to be a Bolshevik meant following the path of the most resistance; and then I was a Bolshevik.” Demonstrations, strikes, rallies—he had to be a part of it all, including the Battleship Potemkin riot in Odessa in 1905. In December of that year he was arrested in a police raid (“on the table were plans, Parabellums, Mausers [types of handguns]”). He spent a few months in solitary, studying shorthand and English and writing poetry (“inevitably”). In the spring of 1906 he was freed and exiled back to Lebedyan.

At twenty-two, Zamyatin treated this altercation with the law as nothing more than a mishap, and he lost no time in going back to St. Petersburg—illegally. More politics: “campaigning, posters, flyers, speeches, ballot boxes.” He was detained for violating his parole, but, due to a bureaucratic error, stayed in the capital for another five years. In the meantime, he graduated from the shipbuilding department of the Polytechnic and entered graduate school, becoming an instructor in 1911. A promising young engineer, he was sent in 1916 to England to supervise the construction of a Russian icebreaker. (The modern equivalent would be a member of the Weather Underground getting a job with NASAT. With this kind of security in Russia, what took the Bolsheviks so long to take over?)

Engineering and revolution were not enough for Zamyatin, however. In “1908, his first story, written simultaneously with his graduation thesis, was published in the newspaper Education, and in 1912 he gained recognition with the dark, brooding novella “Provincial Life.” Still actively pursuing a shipbuilding career, he wrote more stories and another novella, this one entitled A Godforsaken Hole (1914).

Zamyatin hurried back home from England at the first news of the Revolution. “The joyful, horrible winter of 1917-18,” he recalled, “when everything shifted, and took off into the unknown.” Amid the chaos of these years, he still pursued his dual careers, although the accent was now on literature. While teaching engineering at his alma mater, he wholeheartedly plunged himself into the literary life. He wrote stories (and adapted them for the stage), edited books, served on editorial boards, and even taught creative writing. He was also at the center of a loose group of prominent young writers who called themselves the “Serapion Brothers” (after a collection of stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann).

It was not long before Zamyatin grew disenchanted with the revolutionary regime.

It was not long before Zamyatin grew disenchanted with the revolutionary regime. His disenchantment showed in his stories and, especially, in his articles, in which he lashed out against his revolutionary colleagues, who (he pointed out) bent over backward to toe the Party line. “Most of all, contemporary literature lacks truthfulness,” he wrote in one article. “The writer is lying through his teeth; he is too used to speaking while looking over his shoulder.”

The culmination of Zamyatin’s criticism of the regime was, of course, We, a stinging satire of the happy future promised by the Party. The book was finished in 1920 and widely read in what is now called Samizdat; not surprisingly, it never made it to the state’s printing presses. In 1922, Zamyatin was arrested and (incredibly) placed in the same cell he had occupied seventeen years earlier. (The arrest was rumored to be somehow connected with We, although the details are sketchy.) He was soon released and returned to what is now Leningrad.

In the event, We became something of a watershed for Zamyatin. The English-language publication of the book in 1924 finally supplied his critics—whose numbers had been growing—with the ammunition they needed. From then on, he became a non-person, denied publication and constantly harangued in the media until he could stand it no longer. In 1931 he wrote an extraordinary letter to Stalin, requesting permission to leave the USSR Thanks to the intercession of Maxim Gorky, permission was granted. Gorky, the titan of proletarian letters, considered Zamyatin’s novel “hopelessly bad, a completely sterile thing,” but there was apparently still some decency left in him. (Decades later his successors at the helm of the Writers’ Union would be less tolerant: in the late 1960s, Mikhail Sholokhov demanded—futilely, needless to say—that Solzhenitsyn be executed.)

Zamyatin’s last years in Paris were an exile’s nightmare. He did not get along with the virulently monarchist émigré community, and he was barely known to the Western literati. He wrote a few pieces on the theater for French papers, some stories; he started a novel on Attila the Hun . . . Money was scarce, his health was fading (angina pectoris). He died in 1937, lonely, broken, and homesick.

On paper, Zamyatin’s literary output looks relatively modest: a finished novel; a number of novellas and short stories; a few plays, some literary criticism, and an unfinished novel. It can also count as a lot, considering his versatility and the number of careers he juggled in his lifetime.

“Provincial Life” (1912) was his first big success. The story follows the progress of Anfim Baryba from school dropout to kept man to petty thief to false witness to village policeman. Its territory—the bestiality of Russian provincial life—was already well trodden by Gogol, Chekhov, and others before him. But Zamyatin’s province is much darker than that of his predecessors; reason is soundly asleep. Anfim’s rise takes place in a prelapsarian bog; the main passions of the characters are God, food, and vodka, and not necessarily in that order.

“Provincial Life” is an artistic quantum leap from the nineteenth century.

“Provincial Life” is an artistic quantum leap from the nineteenth century. It is closer to a poem, with its chopped sentences and striking rhythms, or to a painting, with its wild images, which are as rich in color as the characters' meals are rich in calories. It is a work both very young, in the boldness of its experiment, and mature, in the confidence of the author’s voice. The distinctive features of Zamyatin’s prose are in place: his stylized use of colloquial, uneducated speech, and his endless—some might say excessive—lexical and grammatical coinages.

In his next short stories, “Alatyr” and “The Womb,” Zamyatin honed his narrative skills and delved deeper into the abyss of provincial life. Then came A Godforsaken Hole (a most infelicitous translation of the title, but more on that later), the novella which crowns his pre-1917 prose.

A Godforsaken Hole was written in 1913–14, and published in Zavety magazine in 1914. The censor deemed it a slander of the military and confiscated the issue. It should be pointed out that, from the days of Pushkin and Benkendorf, tzarist censors, unlike their Soviet successors, considered their primary weapon the carrot rather than the stick. So one can imagine how gravely offended they were by the novella’s damning picture of the army. A halfhearted suit was brought against Zamyatin in the same year. It was delayed by the start of World War I (one would have thought the war might expedite it) and finally won by Zamyatin in 1916—oddly, in the middle of a war that was still popular in Russia. Ten years later, when Zamyatin ran into trouble with Russia’s new rulers, he would be less fortunate.

The novella is positioned on the intersection of two time-honored Russian literary subjects: the philistinism (“meschanstvo”) of provincial life and the moral disintegration of the Russian army. Aleksandr Kuprin’s 1905 novel Duel—perhaps the best-known treatment of the latter theme—is a clear forerunner to Zamyatin’s book. But stylistically the two writers are very different. Kuprin was writing in the mainstream of nineteenth-century critical realism; Zamyatin, conversely, was a thoroughgoing twentieth-century modernist. Indeed, he called himself a “synthetist” or “neo-realist” (not to be confused with Rossellini or Visconti); that is, he relied on wild, seemingly unrelated snapshots to reflect the frenetic tempo of the modern era.

Zamyatin’s protagonist in A Godforsaken Hole, Andrei Ivanych, is a young, idealistic Army officer who arrives to serve at an army base on the Russian Pacific Coast. The novella opens with masterly brio:

Every man has something that sums him up all at once, something that sets him apart from a thousand others. And in Andrei Ivanych that something was—a forehead: the width and breadth of the steppe. Next to the forehead in question was a teeny nose—a pert Russian pug, accompanied by a flaxen mustache and infantry epaulets. When creating him, the good Lord had waved his hands and—presto: a forehead. But then the Lord yawned; boredom set in, so he finished the job haphazardly, any old way, just to get it done. And so, ushered in by God’s yawn, Andrei Ivanych went forth to live his life.

With quick, expressionistic strokes Zamyatin goes on to sketch Andrei Ivanych’s past: a short-lived infatuation with learning, replaced by one with music, soon to turn into one directed at a teacher of music. “To start with a clean slate,” he writes of his hero’s newest aspirations, “the hell with the old, to bounce off to the end of the world. And then, love of the most genuine kind, and a book to be written that will conquer the world . . . .” It takes Zamyatin less than a page to re-create a full-blooded character, emotions and all, that American minimalist writers would struggle through a grim twenty-page story to convey.

The main plot, as told through the eyes of Andrei Ivanych, is simple: the base commander, General Azancheyev, an obese brute, is justly accused by Captain Schmidt, the paymaster, of stealing his soldiers’ rations. In response, the general slanders Schmidt’s young wife, Marusya. In the best Russian tradition, Schmidt slaps him. The general sends him away and blackmails Marusya for sex—or else Schmidt will be court-martialed. (It is difficult to imagine such goings-on from one of Tolstoy’s hussars, those chevaliers sans peuret reproche!) The Russian army had changed since 1812, and so had Russian literature since War and Peace.)

Marusya gives in, and the cowardly general escapes to the nearest town, leaving Schmidt to torment himself, Marusya, and everybody else, including an innocent soldier and even a baby jackdaw. After unsuccessfully challenging Andrei Ivanych to a duel, Schmidt kills himself.

Other characters fare little better. The general’s wife goes insane after losing her baby. Her spinster sister spends her time spying on the general through a peephole. The wife of Captain Nechesa, another... officer at the base, is tormented by her nine children, all by different fathers. One Lt. Tikhmen suspects that the htest could be his, but no one—least of all Mrs. Nechesa—knows the truth. Consumed by unrequited paternal love and humiliated by Captain Nechesa, Tikhmen kills himself. This is pure Chekhov, stripped of all hope and varnished with twentieth-century Angst.

As befits a socially conscientious novel, the cruelty of the upper classes is vented on their social inferiors.

As befits a socially conscientious novel, the cruelty of the upper classes is vented on their social inferiors: soldiers get beaten regularly. But Zamyatin is too smart a writer to fall for easy moralizing; he realizes the superficiality of class distinctions. (Both soldiers and officers speak horrible, uncultured Russian; the soldiers’ talk is simply uneducated, while the officers’ is perverted by pseudo-cultural pretense.) Thus, the soldiers extend the chain of cruelty to the local Chinese population. Killing the latter, whether for sport (by the officers) or profit (by the soldiers), is a misdemeanor at best.

The only fully sympathetic character in the book is Marusya, the victim of both the general’s lust and her husband’s egotism, and, as it happens, the object of Andrei Ivanych’s romantic worship as well. Although her relationship with Schmidt smacks of sadomasochism, Zamyatin is clearly in her corner. Indeed, had Zamyatin been a woman, feminist critics would have adopted him long ago. He shows a special sympathy toward his female characters, not only Marusya but also Afimiya in “The Womb” and later (and most notably) the character of 1-330 in We.

It is with Andrei Ivanych that Zamyatin has the biggest ax to grind. With deadly satire, he shows the hero’s adolescent crush on Marusya, and his inability to act, to protect her, to combat the evil. By having Andrei Ivanych helplessly join the drunken crowd at Schmidt’s wake, rather than kill the general or himself, Zamyatin debunks the whole tradition of nineteenth-century romantic heroes. Here, as in his pre-1917 prose in general, he meets the ideological requirements set forth by influential socialist critics of his time—who called Andrei Ivanyches “superfluous” and accused them of being useless in the proletariat’s struggle—without compromising his modernist aesthetics. It would be impossible for him to continue to do so after 1917.

Artistically, A Godforsaken Hole is an unqualified pleasure. Zamyatin’s style is precise and highly emotional at the same time. His splashy expressionist images are leavened by realistic touches. Here is his description of a smoke-filled room:

In the din, in the reddish fog—not men, but their bits and pieces: here, a watermelon of a bald head; there, slashed by a cloud, the bear-like legs of Captain Nechesa; farther away, a cluster of hairy fists, suspended in the air.

Alas, little of this imagery comes through in the recent translation of A Godforsaken Hole by Walker Foard, published by Ardis. Since it is the only English translation currendy available, we should be grateful for it, but we should also be careful to distinguish it from a completely faithful rendering of Zamyatin’s prose.

By now the reader probably realizes that translating Zamyatin is no picnic. Mr. Foard struggles valiantly, often—and to his credit—finding equivalents for words so obscure and outdated as to pose a problem for even a native speaker (for example: manza, a pejorative racial epithet that he correctly renders as “Chink"). He fares less well with idioms, however, and the book contains a fair share of errors, most of them attributable to Zamyatin’s ellipses and his sneaky use of folksy metaphor. For example: pud soli s’est means not to break bread but to share an ordeal. When Foard literally translates bel’mo as cataract, referring to an ugly chair in an empty room, he misses the point: Zamyatin has merely abbreviated the expression bel’mo v glazu, which means eyesore.

Elsewhere, Foard cannot make the required transition into the native speaker’s shoes. To take one obvious example: When Zamyatin has the general offer Schmidt exotic—to a Russian—ravioli, and then has Schmidt accept an ordinary Russian pirozhok, he seeks to expose the general’s pretentiousness. Foard renders both words literally, without taking into account that pirozhok is more foreign to an American reader than ravioli—which by now is probably as American as pizza. The effect is thus the opposite of the one which Zamyatin intended.

Zamyatin repeatedly uses the expression k chertu na kulichki, literally, “to the devil’s neck of the woods.”

And then there is the problem of the tide. In the text, Zamyatin repeatedly uses the expression k chertu na kulichki, literally, “to the devil’s neck of the woods”; Foard is justified in using “a godforsaken hole” on these occasions. But the title reads simply, Na kulichkakh, a lightly ironic expression better rendered as, for example, In the Sticks—anything milder than A Godforsaken Hole.

However numerous such errors (I pick representative cases, not the most egregious), they would not interfere with most people’s sense of Zamyatin so long as the general tenor of the book was preserved. Yet, just as God created Andrei Ivanych’s forehead and gave up on the rest, so does Mr. Foard seem to have expended his energies on the quest for obscure words. The rhythm of Zamyatin’s prose, now elliptical, now excessive, always poetic, eludes him completely. Here is an example of Zamyatin’s Russian, in a rough translation of my own:

Lent, damp and warm. Mud sloshing underfoot—so bad, it will swallow you any minute.

And it does. Sleepy, on your last legs, you sink, and, nodding off, you beg: “God, a war . . . a fire . . . a binge . . . send me anything.”

Here is Foard’s version of the same passage:

Lent began—the weather turned damp and warm. Mud sloshed underfoot—sloshed so much that it threatened to swallow a man.

And it did so. Already lacking the strength to crawl, a sleepy man sinks down, and dropping off to sleep, implores: “Oh, let there be a war . . . or a fire . . . or at least some heavy drinking…”

Now, Zamyatin’s Russian is idiosyncratic enough to allow for an infinite variety of English versions; but even so Mr. Foard’s seems off the mark. Take the first phrase: “Post veliky, mokret,’ teplyn’” Four words. What they call an “impersonal sentence” and what I would call Russian emotional minimalism. Foard’s “Lent began—the weather turned damp and warm” is much too formal. Mokret’ and teplyn’ mean “dampness” and “warmth” respectively, but, unlike English nouns, they are highly colloquial, almost folksy, the former even slang—certainly way below the literary diction of “the weather turned.”

The rest of the passage is little better. Indeed, with his nineteenth-century past tense, his inclusion of nonexistent words (like “threatened to"), his romantic-poetic “Oh, let there be . . . ,” and, finally, his soberly out-of-place “heavy drinking” (to call a terse Russian colloquialism like zapoi “heavy drinking” is like calling acid a “hallucination-inducing substance”), Foard turns the wonderfully unruly mane of hair that is Zamyatin’s prose into a barbershop showpiece with every hair in place.

In short, in this Ardis edition we get the outlines of Zamyatin’s story and characters, but none of the spirit of his presentation of them. Since A Godforsaken Hole is an accomplished minor novel by a major writer, and an interesting book in its own right, we might hope for something better from English translators in the future.

Zamyatin’s stay in Britain in 1916–17—two years after the appearance of A Godforsaken Hole—resulted in two novellas: The Islanders and The Fisher of Men. These rather snide satires touch upon the surface of British life, raising its hypocrisy to a kind of ritual. They are worth mentioning only in relation to We. Were one to argue (as many do with regard to 1984) that the thrust of the author’s anti-utopian satire goes beyond socialism, these novellas would serve as evidence: Zamyatin’s attitude to the British way of life (and, by extension, capitalism) is decidedly hostile. On the other hand, he was a consummate free spirit, who (as we shall see) was not greatly fond of any stable system.

Zamyatin’s disenchantment with the Bolsheviks upon his return to Russia after the Revolution was predictable.

In retrospect, Zamyatin’s disenchantment with the Bolsheviks upon his return to Russia after the Revolution was predictable. Underneath his revolutionary student rhetoric he was an ordinary liberal, and the violence that is the sine qua non of revolution could only repel him. Living in wartime Petrograd, he could see the dehumanizing effect of the new social order. His stories of that period, “Mamai” and “The Cave,” prefigure the urban satires of Yury Olesha and, later, Mikhail Zoschenko. Now he treats his hapless Andrei Ivanyches, lowly characters who are unable to cope with the ordeals of the new life, with greater sympathy. Mamai (a witty choice of name, evoking the cruel Tatar khan of the fourteenth century) shudders at the thought of having to use a gun on potential robbers, and later plots to steal the last of his family’s money to buy a rare book. Martin Martinych in “The Cave” steals his neighbor’s firewood for his wife’s birthday. These portraits of “little people” pounded by merciless social realities are reminiscent of Gogol’s Overcoat—but the tzars’ censors were better equipped to deal with this sort of criticism than the Soviets. A reviewer wrote of “The Cave”: “Not a word about . . . Bolsheviks, but the entire story is pointed against them. . . . Here one discovers quite clearly that the author is a cold and hostile observer. Only one who did not take an active part in the events and the struggle can write like this.” It was easy for Zamyatin, with his revolutionary jail record, to refute the latter charge—but the accusations mounted.

Although these stories are well polished and powerful in their own quiet way, one leaves them with a mixed feeling as to Zamyatin’s attitude toward the regime. This ambiguity may well have been intentional, since the stories were meant to reflect a period of great uncertainty. At the same time, the stories reflect his own ambivalence: as an artist, Zamyatin was above all honest, and the gap between the Revolution’s goals, toward which he was sympathetic, and its reality, which horrified him, was fast becoming too wide to ignore. He was more outspoken about his doubts in his newspaper articles from this period. In a 1921 piece entitled “I Fear,” he wrote: “I fear that Russian literature has only one future: its own past.”

These are strong words, and they were duly noted by his opponents. He wrote enough such statements that, even if We had never been written, it is hard to believe that Zamyatin’s fate would have been any different. The rulers demanded unconditional loyalty; Zamyatin the artist could not render unto Caesar what was the Muse’s.

The first Russian-language edition of We, published in Prague, was amended intentionally, to protect the author from persecution (with little effect, as it turned out). The standard Russian-language edition was published many years later, in 1952, by the Chekhov House in New York. It is presumably based upon a manuscript that was sent to New York in 1921 for English translation, but there is some doubt about its faithfulness to the original manuscript, whose location is unknown (some Soviet archive, perhaps).

Just as We occupies a special place in world literature, its place in Zamyatin’s work is special, too. All his works have a satirical edge, but We is the only pure satire he ever wrote.

The novel, set in a distant future, is narrated through the diary of its protagonist, D-503, the chief designer of “Integral,” the spaceship that would travel to other worlds for missionary purposes. The first entry, copied from the State Paper, reads: “If they [aliens] do not understand that we bring them mathematically infallible happiness, it is our duty to make them happy.” The statement has a military ring to it: the fate of those refusing happiness is sealed. As always, Zamyatin wastes no time in setting the tone of the book. The world is ruled by the omnipotent Single State, headed by the Benefactor (who, in his baldness, resembles Lenin). The Table of Hourly Commandments schedules all daily activities: waking, working, walking, even sex—at which time the citizens are allowed to draw the shades (they live—literally—in glass houses). All citizens are designated by letter/number combinations: consonants/odd numbers for men, vowels/even numbers for women (sort of like California during the oil crisis).

Like his fellow numbers, D-503 is happy. He waxes poetic about The Table of Hourly Commandments and its predecessor, the Railroad Schedule, that “classic of ancient literature.” His world is run on a simple formula: happiness equals bliss divided by envy. With total equality, envy is gone, and the value of the fraction—happiness—goes to infinity.

But then D-503 runs into 1-330—with her “dazzling, almost vicious teeth”—and his world falls apart. She’s an oddball: drinks, smokes, likes old music, old clothes—she’s even sarcastic! (In modern American parlance, she has an “attitude problem.”) D-503 has had disturbing thoughts before: √1 , for example, an irrational number—how is that possible? But never like this. As 1-330 draws him deeper into her world, he realizes that he is in love; he is afflicted with having a soul.

1-330 belongs to the “Mephis,” a revolutionary group who live beyond the Green Wall, outside D-503’s world. They attempt to seize his spaceship, but fail. Meanwhile, the soul epidemic spreads, and the Single State decrees that all citizens must have their “imagination centers” removed. D-503 subjects himself to this “fantasectomy” and betrays 1-330, who is tortured and executed in the Benefactor’s Machine. In the end, D-503 is back to normal. “And I hope we will overcome,” he thinks. “Moreover, I'm sure we will. Because reason must overcome.”

If this all seems familiar from dozens of other books and films that depict a dehumanizing, totalitarian world, let me remind you that it was written almost seventy years ago, and has been imitated many times since. Moreover, it is not mere science fiction, but a political satire of a doctrine that was (and is) all too real. When it comes to the book’s influence on Orwell—an important question, given the enormous popularity of 1984—the issue of imitation cannot be resolved in simple terms, especially since reality itself evolved in complex ways between 1920 and 1948, the year 1984 appeared. In short, there is no way of determining whether Orwell’s novel owes more to the fiction of We or to the reality that evolved in Stalin’s Russia.

We has been translated into English four times, with varying results.

We has been translated into English four times, with varying results; Mirra Ginsburg’s translation (Bantam, 1972) seems to have been accepted as the standard. We is, on balance, an easier piece to translate than A Godforsaken Hole, lacking the mind-boggling dialect and colloquialisms. Nevertheless, some of the criticism of Mr. Foard applies to Mirra Ginsburg as well, albeit on a much smaller scale. She slips especially in rendering dialogue. In We this is the harder part; Zamyatin consciously makes his characters, especially D-503 and his previous lover O-90, so unsure, so afraid of their feelings, that they rarely finish their sentences, which requires a particular sensitivity on the part of the translator. Mirra Ginsburg cheerfully undertakes to finish what she considers an unfinished job, converting, the ellipses to full stops; in the narrative, this makes D-503 appear more coherent than he is in Russian, and in the dialogue it leads to misinterpretations.

There are other oddities that would raise an American reader’s eyebrows, like the reference to “Pythagoras’s trousers”; this is a literal translation of “Pyfagorovy shtany [vo vse storony ravny],” a schoolkid’s jocular ditty, meant to help to memorize the Pythagorean theorem. When D-503 talks about his “vatnye nogi,” he surely means that his legs—not his feet—feel “like cotton.” And there are other minor slips. When O-90 says to D-503, “Gulyat,’” she is being coquettishly strict with him (the Russian infinitive form implies a command); she is certainly saying something more subtle than “Let’s go for a walk.” But such goofs are not numerous, and the translation on the whole gives a fairly good idea of the book.

And what a book it is! Even in the 1980s, after all the literary imitation and all the political developments that have happened since the first appearance of We, it still strikes us as an exciting work of art; and even though some readers may find its literary modernism a bit outdated—as modernism in general tends to seem these days—it serves the purpose of creating a perfect framework for Zamyatin’s harrowing vision of the future.

Zamyatin’s mastery in We, the extraordinary reach of his versatile talent, invites an infinite number of interpretations. A few ingenious ones—and a few more tedious than ingenious—are on display in Zamyatin’s We, a collection of essays by American and European scholars. Those readers who admire We, and who are curious about other people’s opinions of the book, will find this collection of more than passing interest. While some of the articles feel rather dense (my favorite sentence: “R. D. Laing would term [D-503’s psychological state] the fear of implosion by the ontologically insecure”), none of them has the feel of an extended tenure application or deconstructionist daydream.

For example, Richard Gregg gives an interesting textual analysis of We as a version of Genesis 1-4. (Ah, but for the ending . . . ) Elsewhere, We is explored as a Jungian myth, not unlike Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. Much attention is given to Zamyatin’s use of yellow, and to his use of the eye as a major device of characterization. (This last theme reminded me of Julian Barnes’s tongue-in-cheek analysis of the color of Emma Bovary’s eyes—brown? black?—in Flaubert’s Parrot.)

However pedantic some of this may sound, the attention to Zamyatin’s stylistic methods in Zamyatin’s We is perfectly justified. In his earlier provincial dramas, where his fictional reality could be traced to a “real” one, his modernist style was sometimes at odds with his incessant folkiness, as well as with his choice of subject matter. But in We, a fantasy, the form and the content come fully together; his “synthetism” conveys the frenetic tempo and shocking newness of his future world. As he wrote in his essay “On Literature, Revolution, and Entropy,”

the old, slow, soporific descriptions are no more: laconicism—but every word supercharged, high voltage . . . syntax becomes elliptical, quick. . . . The image is sharp, synthetic, it contains only one basic feature, the kind you can catch from a moving automobile.

The art that arises out of modern reality, he added, must be “fantastic like a dream.”

There is one aspect of Zamyatin’s style in We that may strike the reader as odd, however, and it touches on a crucial question concerning the role of science in the book: long before D-503 is felled by Cupid’s arrows, his manner of expression is distinctly uncharacteristic of a technocrat. He may be filled with adoration of the mathematical precision of the Single State, but his vision of the world is so metaphoric, so visually striking, as to sow the seeds of doubt in a skeptical reader:

The sky [D-503 muses]: deserted, blue, ravished by a storm. Shadows form bristly angles, everything is cut out of blue autumn air, everything is fragile, you’re terrified to touch it: it will instantly crack and disperse in a glass dust. And this is in me, too: mustn’t think, don’t don’t think, otherwise—

A modern creative-writing purist might object: would an engineer talk like this? To make an inevitable comparison with 1984, doesn’t Winston sound much more like a “techie” than D-503? How does one account for this?

Well, for one thing, geniuses do not play by the rules. But also, while it is true that it is a rare Silicon Valley nerd who heeds the call of the Muse, Zamyatin’s career precedes the blossoming of Creative Writing (although he did teach it): the chasm between the arts and sciences was not as great in Zamyatin’s time as it is today, and an engineer writing about, say, the “teeny baby suns on every belt buckle” was less likely to raise an eyebrow, especially in Russia, where the technical intelligentsia had traditionally looked beyond the laboratory walls. (Garin-Mikhailovsky, a moderately well-known novelist of the 1890s, was a geologist; Solzhenitsyn started by teaching physics, too.) In fact, until the debate over “physics vs. lyrics” in the 1960s, when budding Soviet technocrats rashly proclaimed the priority of nuclear physics over lyrical poetry, a Russian engineer was assumed to take an interest in things cultural.

The aesthetics of We, then, are not incompatible with the character of the scientist.

The aesthetics of We, then, are not incompatible with the character of the scientist; but neither are they safe and secure in the novel’s totalitarian, scientific state. The use of mathematical imagery in We is understandably extensive: the hero is an engineer, and the Single State bases its rule upon neat mathematical formulas. One must wonder, then: to what extent are they the cause of the nightmare world in the book? In one of the essays in Zamyatin’s We, the English scholar Leighton Brett Cooke sets out to answer this question by showing that the mathematics of We constitute far more than a satire on the idea that the exact sciences are superior to the fine arts.

At first glance, Zamyatin mordantly mocks the domination of the humanities by science. State Post R13 (whose “negroid” features are a light hint at Pushkin) composes a sonnet entitled “Happiness”:

Eternally enamored two-times-two,
Eternally fused in a passionate four,
The most passionate lovers in the world,
The inseparable two-times-two . . .

And on it went, about the wise, eternal happiness of the multiplication table [which is] wiser and more absolute than the ancient God; it never—do you understand?—never errs. And there are no happier numbers than those living according to the streamlined, eternal laws of the multiplication table. No hesitations, no deviations. Truth is one, and the way of truth is one; and this truth is two times two, and this way of truth is four. And would this not be absurd if these happily, ideally multiplicated twos started thinking about some freedom, i.e., clearly an error?

In We, happiness is security, and security is peace of mind, the absence of doubt. And what can provide for it better than the the soothing calmness of two-times-two? The multiplication table, Zamyatin seems to say, and the technological progress that stems from it, are threats to freedom.

But is that really his message? Surely Zamyatin, builder of icebreakers, was no Luddite. In his journalism, he used Einstein’s theory of relativity as an argument for trashing nineteenth-century realism as outdated in the modern, four-dimensional world; he could hardly have made science a necessary accomplice in the suppression of freedom. A detailed analysis of We shows that the rulers of the Single State were familiar with only the most basic math, like the four rules of arithmetic and Euclidean geometry. By contrast, Zamyatin hints that the “Mens” (Mr. Cooke misses out on the ironic Mephistopheles reference) are familiar with such advanced notions as imaginary and complex numbers, curve equations, and multiple unknowns. He also hints that the Single State is not so much ignorant of science beyond Pythagoras as it is determined to put a lid on it.

Mr. Cooke documents his case convincingly, and you don’t need a Ph.D to enjoy it. Moreover, real-life parallels to the abuse of science by the powers that be are numerous, from Lysenko’s short-lived triumph to the woes of modern Soviet scientists, who are prevented by the KGB from freely exchanging ideas with their Western counterparts.

Thus, it is not science itself but the uses to which science is put by a totalitarian state that is the issue in We. In this respect, Zamyatin’s book differs markedly from the anti-utopia it so profoundly influenced, 1984. In Orwell’s book, two times two is not reliably four but rather whatever the Party says it is, four today and five tomorrow. Of course, Orwell’s solidly satirical approach is well grounded in Soviet reality. The Party’s sole motivation is indeed naked power—and nothing else. Zamyatin’s eighteen-carat sarcasm goes further, however. His Single Party seeks to impose happiness on its subjects by means of a rigid, if limited, application of scientific principles.

There are other, related differences between the two books that are worth pausing over. One of the main themes of 1984—some will say it is the theme—is the power of the Party’s he, the everyday lie that the Party imposes on its subjects. Zamyatin’s Party, however, seems to play it straight: it delivers happiness—so long as you accept the infallibility and total importance of “two times two is four.” The price tag is the closing of one’s mind to all other possibilities. The horror of 1984 is not hard to comprehend. All you need to do is juxtapose two scenes: the smiling, applauding workers in a May Day parade on the one hand and the same workers being threatened with punishment if they do not attend the parade on the other. In We, the smiles are genuine, and that’s the real horror.

Zamyatin was less interested in the exact nature of a political system.

Zamyatin was less interested in the exact nature of a political system (Orwell’s great concern) than with the preservation of internal freedom at all costs. This concern put him at odds with many kinds of authority. The dangers of giving in to seduction, whether in the form of material prosperity or peace of mind; of relinquishing one’s freedom of choice; of indulging in the sweet abandon of slavery; of seeking out a Benefactor who will make up your mind for you—these were Zamyatin’s fears.

In another interesting article in Zamyatin’s We, Kathleen Lewis and Harry Weber discuss the relationship between Zamyatin and the “proletarian poets” of the Twenties and Thirties in the Soviet Union. Gary Kern, the editor of the collection, remarks in his introduction that this essay is “especially valuable in that the proletarians are not read much anymore.” (I assume he is referring to academe when he writes “not much” instead of “not at all.”) The very title We, as E. J. Brown notes in another essay, is an ironic reference to the glorification of collectivism by the proletarian poets who constituted the so-called Proletkult, an embryo Ministry of Culture that was created in 1917.

The Red Star, whose author, Aleksandr Bogdanov, was the Proletkult’s main theorist.

The proletarian poets were really an army of hacks who owed their artistic status to the regime. They licked the giving hand with such fervor and such ineptitude that even Trotsky complained: “. . . illiterate poems do not make proletarian poetry because they do not make poetry at all.” Poets like Aleksei Gastev and others daily extolled the poetry of industrial labor in ardent metallurgical metaphors: “We are the smiths, our spirit is young/We forge the keys to happiness.” These lines ended up as lyrics to a marching song that is still heard in the USSR on May Day.

Passage by passage, the Lewis and Weber article tracks down the numerous examples of how We parodies the exaltation over turbines and the swooning over flywheels. It leads one to speculate that it was not so much the politics of Zamyatin’s book as his sarcastic attitude toward his colleagues that got him into trouble with them. But how could someone as richly endowed with a sense of humor as Zamyatin refrain from spoofing his grim, determined contemporaries? Especially since he was a professional himself. He noted in his Auto-Interview (1932) that the proletarian poets were “illiterate in respect to industrial technology . . . . More than once I have blushed for these authors when I read their dilettante sketches.”

The real name of the game was power.

Lewis and Weber confine themselves to literary analysis in their essay, but people do not become non-persons for their aesthetics alone, of course: there were important ideological issues at stake. In 1929, Proletkult was transformed into RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) as part of the First Five-Year Plan, and the publication of We abroad gave the group its official casus belli against Zamyatin. The real name of the game was power: Zamyatin’s continual jabbing at these servile hacks was a constant threat to their legitimacy. Add a Salieri-like envy, and the still very much alive inferiority complex that a Soviet author feels toward a colleague who has been published abroad, and you have all the elements for the kind of campaign against Zamyatin that was later replayed against Pasternak, Daniel, Sinyavsky. (With Solzhenitsyn, things got even more serious.) And, as if all this were not enough, Zamyatin was a lightning rod for others, with his leadership of the “Serapion Brothers.” In short, a lesson needed to be taught—and so it was. Most of the members of the “Serapion Brothers”—Konstantin Fedin, Valentin Katayev, Veniamin Kaverin—buckled down and became respected members of the Writers’ Union and award-winning spear-carriers for the Party.

Some of the attacks from the proletarians are reproduced in Zamyatin’s We, and they are a riot if you appreciate political/cultutal ironies (if you don’t, you probably didn’t enjoy We in the first place). In order to laugh, though, you must forget for a moment that this was no mere bickering in The New York Review of Books; rather, it was a question of survival. When confronted with Zamyatin’s English satires, the Soviet critics took him to task, claiming that he failed to find the “other England,” i.e., the working-class one. (Orwell did, later, but they didn’t like him either. Quite demanding, the Soviets.) The best criticism of We: “straightforward, maliciously clear rationalistic piece of agitation” (Mikhailov). To a Soviet reader, this must sound like a five-star review.

Simply pointing the finger at the Party for these attacks, or even at Stalin, seems to me simplistic. Stalin and his cohorts had more urgent things on their minds at the time than looking for seditious parallels in satirical novels; thus, they delegated the purge of unacceptable writers to their trusted literary henchmen, who performed admirably. When Mayakovsky was writing as a proletarian poet—before his own fortunes took a tragic turn—he wished that “the pen could be made equal to the bayonet.” .Horrible things happen when metaphors are loosed from the printed page.

The literary influence of such Dostoevsky novels as Notes from the Underground and The Possessed on Zamyatin’s work is obvious, but it was “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov that influenced his philosophy. In that novel, freedom and earthly happiness are incompatible, and mankind is doomed to wrestle with the insoluble problem of existence. While implicitly accepting this notion, Zamyatin seems to conclude that happiness lies, rather, in fighting for freedom, i.e., in revolution. Narrowly interpreted, that made him, like many others, a comrade before the Revolution, an antagonist after.

At first Zamyatin’s art (and inherent humanism) made him look away from the Revolution’s “excesses,” which were in fact its integral part. But later, when he acknowledged them, did he turn completely around? Here is one of the most famous excerpts from We. After 1-330 describes to D-503 the Mephis’ plot, he exclaims:

“This is unthinkable! This is nonsense! Don’t you understand that what you’re planning is revolution!”

“Yes it is. Why is it nonsense?”

“Because a revolution can’t be. Because ours—I say this, not you—our revolution was the last one. And no more revolutions are possible. Anyone knows that—”

“. . . So name the last number for me.”

“. . . I—I don’t understand: what do you mean, the last?”

“The last, the highest, the greatest.”

“But, 1-330, this is nonsensical. If numbers are infinite, what kind of last one do you want?”

“But what kind of last revolution do you want? There’s no last one; revolutions are infinite.”

This passage is generally cited as proof of Zamyatin’s protest against totalitarianism. No doubt. But what is the guarantee that the “Mephis” will lead mankind to freedom? To take I-330’s words at face value, another revolution will be needed, and another. Interpreted ideologically, this prescription sounds rather close to Trotsky’s “permanent revolution.” Did Zamyatin the idealist see freedom as a horizon that no number of revolutions could bring us to? His artistic temperament seemed to need such cataclysms. Could his constant rebelliousness have been merely a refusal to grow up (a phenomenon well known to. generations of American artists)? We’ll never know.

Zamyatin was an artist from head to toe.

In his unfinished novel, The Scourge of God, he draws a sympathetic image of Attila (granted, the Hun is only seventeen by the end)—another anarchic force. Through a number of parallels, Zamyatin seems to hint that the West shall be buried under the assault of the East. Whether this was a warning, we'll never know, either. The novel-fragment is written in highly traditional, excellent classical prose that smoothly incorporates the visual fireworks of his early “neo-realism.” The artist seemed to calm down with age—not so the ideologue.

According to Mr. Kern, it is not Zamyatin’s correct prediction of the details of the Marxist state—like Pravda (“the State Gazette”) or the Iron Curtain (“the Green Wall”)—that still prevents the publication of We in the USSR, It is “the ideological argument, the denial of a final revolution and a final truth, which is intolerable to the Soviet power.” Were We to be published today, he writes, “it would hardly cause a mass revolution, but it might start a little revolution in the mind of each reader . . . . So long as it is banned, all talk of freedom of speech and thought in the USSR must be regarded as sham.” Very true. But there is also every reason to believe that someone like Zamyatin would not fare well in the West, either, for very different reasons.

Zamyatin was an artist from head to toe. By definition, for him, an artist was a heretic, firmly in opposition to authority, be it the authority of political power or of the cultural establishment. I don’t think he was opposed to popular success in principle (most likely he just didn’t think about it), but his aesthetic convictions certainly would have made it hard for him to cash in on modern-day bestsellerdom. And could his loathing for compromise, his extraordinary lie-detecting capacity, his disposition to sarcasm and satire, make him popular with the grant committees, the Pulitzer juries, and the other trappings of American High Culture?

Zamyatin’s fate in Stalin’s Russia, had he stayed, is not in doubt; people with less backbone died by the millions. By contrast, opposing the establishment in the United States is the safest game in the world, resulting at worst in a lost contract or a denial of tenure. Here, Zamyatin would have lived a long, healthy life. Whether it would have been a happy one is hard to say.

But let us not get morbid. Let us imagine: Zamyatin was good at that. Let us imagine him following Faulkner and Fitzgerald to sunny Southern California; let us imagine him waking, in a Rip Van Winkle mode, after fifty years. He walks into a bookstore, and what does he see? Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and his compatriot Alexander Zinoviev’s brilliant The Yawning Heights—all prime anti-utopias whose politics and aesthetics are widely diverse. He walks into Westwood; what’s playing? Blade Runner, a flashy, pop-art vision of totalitarian LA in the twenty-first century, and Brazil, a flamboyant satire whose aesthetics are influenced more by MTV than by literature. Our hero turns on the TV, and what does he see? Rock videos abounding in anti-totalitarian imagery—robodike masses and gigantic portraits of political leaders being smashed by long-haired rebels.

Zamyatin’s fate in Stalin’s Russia, had he stayed, is not in doubt.

From a philosophical novel of 1920 to a political satire of 1948 to a rock video in 1988: the twentieth-century odyssey of a literary genre, and perhaps an inevitable one. High art does not have a monopoly on its own ideas, nor has popular culture ever needed a license to appropriate. Indeed, such vertical cross-pollination will always be with us, and only an Aldous Huxley would curl his lip at that.

The genre of anti-utopia, whatever its form, is an exercise in alertness, a reminder of terrible possibilities, and, as such, it too will always be with us. Also, its vision is not necessarily totally dark. Even We has a happy ending—of sorts. D-503’s ex-girlfriend O-90, pregnant with his child, escapes beyond the Green Wall rather than subject herself to a “fantasectomy.” Zamyatin’s sarcasm had no limits. And yet, he remained an optimist.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 7 Number 4, on page 21
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